Friday, May 1, 2009

The Watchers

Hodir

For about a week or so, we’ve been banging our head against Thorim. We went in Tuesday night and plowed right through Flame Leviathan, XT-002, Razorscale, and Kologarn. It took a couple of attempts, be we managed to put down Auriya again as well. We two shot Hodir, but I spent the last half of the fight doing a detailed examination of Hodir’s cold hard floor.

I was DPS for that fight and made one of the classic blunders. No, it wasn’t starting a land war in Asia, or did I go up against a Sicilian when death was on the line. We were fighting Hodir and it was time for Flash Freeze. I noticed that the glyph for where the big snowball would fall was basically right underneath him. I kept whacking away at his backside. The snowballs fell and my brain uttered those fateful words “Probably got time for one more swing…” FLASH FREEZE! I’m now DUG (Dwarf Under Glass). Our DPS Warrior valiantly tried to bust me out, but I died before he could. We downed Hodir anyway.

He dropped a Conqueror token, which I was fortunate enough to win over the two Priests we had that night. My first piece of Tier 8 is my Pants, err skirt…. I mean kilt!

Freya

Instead of banging our head against Thorim, we decided to go Thursday and learn Freya.

First thing you’ll notice is Freya has a metric ton of trash. It’s about 3 different packs that repeat, along with some that have some large patrol paths. Most of the trash involves pulling a single mob out and killing it away from the rest of the mobs. You can expect some accidental pulls and raid wipes. We decided to kill all 3 of the Elders and do the fight in ‘Normal’ mode.

When we got Freya herself, she buffed herself with a healing aura that could only be removed by dealing with three different sets of adds that come at one minute intervals.The large Ent wasn’t a problem. I was tanking Freya herself and all I needed to do was make sure I got under a mushroom. Healing can get a little tight at that point because your healer has to move under a mushroom as well. You should be ready with a Divine Protection or Trinket, especially if you are being healed by a Holy Paladin who lacks both HoTs and doesn’t heal on the run all that well.

The small flowers that blow up weren’t much of a problem. My Death Knight partner dropped a Death and Decay and we single targeted each one down. They blow up when die so you don’t want too many dying at once. That tends to do bad things to your Tank as my Death Knight friend discovered.

The really challenging set of Adds is a three pack that includes two plants and a Water Elemental. The trick is they all 3 have to die within a couple seconds of each other. If one dies before the others, he’ll rez and you won’t be able to get them all down before the next set of adds come and your raid will wipe horribly.

It took us a couple of attempts to figure it out. What we did was split our DPS into teams and assigned each team to an add. That worked well unless one team got ahead. So we had our DPS stop once the mob reached 10%, then our Raid Leader would call for a burn.

Once we got through the add stage, Freya herself was pretty easy. I had been banging away at her for 3 or 4 minutes while the rest of the raid dealt with the Add waves. I could have literally auto-attacked the rest of the fight and held threat on her.I was really happy I had done the research on gear because she did drop an Ironbark Faceguard which I passed to my Death Knight. I’ll get the next one.

Thorim

With Freya defeated, it was time to turn our attention back to Thorim. We sent our Tankadin, a Hunter, and a Resto Druid into the tunnel leaving the balance of our raid in the Arena. Now I was in the tunnel so I can’t comment on what happened in the Arena but something clicked. For the first time ever, the Arena team was keeping up and even getting ahead of the spawns.

In the tunnel, we were slow to move and got nailed by the mini-bosses flame attack that travels down one side of the tunnel. It’s sort of like the Skadi gauntlet in Utgarde Pinnacle.

We could feel the progress being made and on our next pull, the tunnel team got all the way to Thorim. My raid leader reminded me to not run down the middle, and just as he did, I discovered the Paralytic Fields which stick you in place and remembered WHY I wasn’t supposed to run down the middle.

At that point I was frantic to get down to the Arena Floor and be ready to taunt Thorim off my Death Knight when he got the Unbalancing Strike. In my haste, I hit the second Paralytic Field. Way to go, Honors! I finally jump down and promptly missed the first Unbalancing Strike. My Death Knight managed to survive it with cooldowns, and I got the next one. After a couple of transitions, Thorim was freed of Yogg Saron’s grasp.

Mimiron

Only one watcher remained, Mimiron.

Mimiron’s trash is interesting and probably the most difficult in the instance. Several of the mobs can and will one shot even your tanks. All of the mobs are mechanical so your typical Crowd Control of Sheep won’t help much.

We would root the Bomb Bots and kill them from range. A couple of times, as I was trying to pick up the small packs of Robots, appropriately enough named Trash, I would wonder over to a Bomb Bot and it would blow me up.

The real buggers are the sappers. They look like little robot gnomes, and they do this little Hellfire AoE that nailed me for over 66,000 damage. “General Calrissian, our cruisers can’t repel fire power of that magnitude!”

Our solution was to have our Death Knight and Hunter kite the Sappers while we got the Trash packs and Tank down. Yeah, in addition to the Bombs, and the Sappers, you have to fight a tank. Once the Tank is down, you can jump in it and use it against the other mobs, but you don’t have very long before it dies.

After you get through the trash, you come to this huge train looking thing that reminds you of the Tram from Ironforge to Stormwind.We hopped in and sped down the track and soon found ourselves in Mimiron’s room.It was late so we didn’t have much time to work on him. When you aggro Mimiron he does a little monologue. Apparently, he wasn’t too keen on us turning XT-002 into scrap metal. Sorry, really. Then he jumps in a gnome sized version of Flame Leviathan. Only this time, I didn’t have a Siege Engine.

There were two special attacks I was on the look out for, Plasma Blast and Shock Blast. Since Plasma Blast was a 3 second channel, I was watching for it to popup in his Cast Bar, but I never saw it. Neither did I see Shock Blast. We never made it much past the 80% mark.

I’m going to buy a Glyph of Salvation and have it in my bags for the next time we face him. I’ll Divine Protection the first Plasma Blast and Hand of Salvation the next one. Hopefully we will have pushed him into Phase 2 by that point.

Once we get Mimiron down, it’ll be time to head into the Descent Into Madness.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

A tip to skip the mimiron trash, if your in a rush at the end of the night. Get two paladins and two swiftness potions. Both pallies take the potions and bubble while running down the hallway through the robot trash. Once your bubble is about to expire, one paladin DI's the other a safe distance from where the trash is originally parked at. Rez your friend and the two of you take the train to the other end and 'unlock' the teleporter. Voila, your raid can now teleport directly to the stairs leading down to mimiron.

External cooldowns are mandatory for Mimiron's first phase. And some won't work. Guardian Spirit will not work. The Glyph of Salvation is a weak cooldown, because it axes so much threat, and only provides 20% mitigation, which still means you're gonna be eating a ton of damage.

However, you, Honors, hold the key to surviving the first phase. Just not in the manner you might have anticipated. Your DPS should be hitting hard enough that you see no more than three plasma blasts. With that in mind, you need to remember that Prot Pallies have 2 external cooldowns that they can cast on others, but not on themselves. Hand of Sacrifice, and Divine Sacrifice. You need to let the other tank take phase one. They use their cooldowns to survive the first plasma blast. You then cast hand of sacrifice to get him to survive the second blast. On the third blast is where you'd want to use pain supression if you have a Disc priest. Otherwise, it becomes where you bubble and cast divine sacrifice.

If your healers are on top of things, the 30% mitigation from the sacrifices will keep the other tank alive. And if the DPS is hitting hard enough, then three blasts are all you need to cover, and as a prot pally, you can ensure that the tank can survive those three blasts.

Like any sound Group, you should be running with 2 tanks, and Mimiron is no exception (even if for the very least its a backup tank in case tank 1 dies to the 7000 lethal horrors this event unleashes).

Out typical strat is to have the non-pally tank start the fight, and use his CD on the first Plasma Blast. On the second, he uses any kind of Oh Crap I Want To Live button (Last Stand for Warriors) while me (pally tank) uses Hand of Sacrifice on him and help heal myself. Then I wait till after the next shockblast and while we're all running back in I taunt and tank him. I'll use Divine Protection on his 3rd Plasma Blast, and in the rare case theres a 4th I yell in vent for heals, hover my finger over my LoH, and stare at my health bar.

So far its worked perfect everytime. If you're really afraid of not getting enough healing, then I'd suggest using that Glyph of Salvation, but have you start off tanking. Tank the first Plasma blast with DP, then use Salvation on yourself for the second. Immediately have the second tank taunt off you so you don't lose aggro, then have him blow his cooldown for the 3rd plasma blast, and for the 4th Hand of Sacrifice him.

A Tip for Phase 3, I stand right under Mimiron's flying head, range-aggroing Junkbots (Exor, AS, Pyro-rockets) and wait for bombs to drop. I'll actually taunt bombs that fall and they'll always go after me. They blow up, and I'm still at about half health, compared to letting them run wild and trying to kill them before they oneshot a clothie.

GL on Mimiron, he's the toughest guy in Ulduar I'd state. So Much spacial awareness involved